Fermentative production processes for chemicals with sugars as raw materials are used for the production of various industrial raw materials. Currently, as sugars to be fermentation raw materials, for example, sugars originated from food raw materials such as sugarcane, starch, and sugar beets are industrially used. However, there is concern that food raw materials will run short, and their prices will soar in the future due to an increase in world population, posing a problem of the construction of a process that efficiently manufactures sugar solutions from reproducible non-food resources, that is, cellulose-based biomass.
The cellulose-based biomass mainly contains lignin as an aromatic polymer and cellulose and hemicellulose as polymers of monosaccharides. Examples of a method of manufacturing a sugar solution with the cellulose-based biomass as a raw material include a method that directly hydrolyzes the cellulose-based biomass as the raw material using concentrated sulfuric acid or the like and a pretreatment-enzymatic saccharification method that performs pretreatment such as digesting treatment, pulverizing treatment, and dilute sulfuric treatment on the cellulose-based biomass in advance to desorb the cellulose and hemicellulose from the lignin and then performs hydrolysis with a diastatic enzyme such as cellulase.
The pretreatment-enzymatic saccharification method in general has an advantage of having a lower environmental load than the method that directly hydrolyzes raw materials, while having a low yield of sugars. In view of this, a method of pretreatment using an ammonia-containing treating agent is developed as a pretreatment method that has a lower environmental load and can obtain a high sugar yield (refer to Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2008-161125, for example).
However, while it is known that the method of pretreatment using the ammonia-containing treating agent improves the enzymatic saccharification efficiency of the cellulose-based biomass, no sufficient consideration has been given to chemical reactions that occur in the cellulose-based biomass by the method of pretreatment using the ammonia-containing treating agent and resultant specific compounds.
In view of the above circumstances, it could be helpful to identify a substance originated from the cellulose-based biomass obtained by treating with the ammonia-containing treating agent and establish a method of collecting the substance.